The Crows
by GofG
Summary: It was briefly mentioned in The Dark Half that the hospital Thad Beaumont attended got attacked by the Crows. This isn't as brief. T for blood, gore. Oneshot.


Something hit the window, and it caught my attention, because there was a loud cracking sound. The first thought to go through my head was that the window was bulletproof; the projectile had to be something fairly dense to actually crack it. Perhaps the beak of a woodpecker would be able to do it. No, no, the woodpecker's beak was not dense enough. Maybe it was a rock, but no, how would a rock get to the fourth floor of a hospital? No, but it might have been a bird with a rock in its mouth. That is a possibility.

I say this was all one thought, because it really was. I consider myself an educated man, and because of this I consider myself to have the ability to think clearly and quickly.

This is irrelevant to the issue at hand. What cracked the window? The second thought that occurred to me was that I should look at the window. So I did.

A crow had hit the window. Some of its blood was splattered against the impenetrable yet cracked glass. Running calculations through my head, I realized there was no way a crow could have accidentally run into this window and cracked it. Its speed would have had to be enormous to crack the window. Much faster than a crow's average flying speed. It was possible, yes, but highly unlikely that a crow would specifically be flying that fast directly into a window.

Unless… Unless it was being chased by a predator! Yes! I looked to the left of the crow. There were more crows, flying in circles a few meters away from my window. There were a lot of them. Maybe hundreds. There was an answer to this. Maybe there was a dead animal near the ground of the hospital. That would explain… a few crows. Maybe there were a lot of dead animals. Maybe dozens of dead animals. I looked down. There were none.

I began to panic, looking out over what were obviously at least a thousand crows. There were few explanations left. Very few. Supernatural events caused these crows to come to this hospital. No, that was an impossibility. Someone had let out the scent of a dead animal without there actually being dead animals. Some psychopath. No, that would have drawn a _few_ crows. This was a _hell of a lot of_ crows. Circling in wide ovals.

_Fuck_. I forgot. I turned back to the operating table. It was a simple operation, just to remove something from the individual's leg, and I didn't need any assistants for it, but he was knocked out from the anesthesia and I had forgotten about him. I went back to his leg and wiped up the incision I had made earlier. But I couldn't work.

Because the crows were watching me. I could hear them, cawing outside. Loudly. They hadn't been earlier but they were now. _Caw, caw, caw_. A steady drone of cawing, and I couldn't work with it. I walked back to the window. They had tightened up their oval. It looked like a tornado of crows, a few feet in diameter.

I realized why I was unsettled. This was eerily similar to the Alfred Hitchcock movie, _The Birds_, based off the short story of the same name by the British man whose name I couldn't recall. But those were all types of birds, a statistical anomaly. These were only crows, and therefore there must be a reason, a purpose, for their being here. And yet their cawing grew louder. It was as if it was emanating from my own head, driving me mad. I moved my hands to my face, massaging my temples. But the cawing grew louder.

Perhaps others in the hospital heard the cawing. Yes, they must have, how could they not? I walked out the door, leaving my patient bleeding on the table. He would be fine, though, definitely. I walked down the hall and looked in the window of another surgeon's room. He was looking out the window. He obviously heard them. How could he not? They were pounding in this man's head too. The cawing. I still heard them, even though I had put two walls in-between me and those damned crows. I walked back to my room, the crows' insane cawing continuing to grow steadily louder. I felt my head would split open. When I opened the door, I noticed that another crow had hit my window, and cracked it sharply. I went back to the window and looked out at them. They were now all in a sphere, swerving in and out of each other with an agility I had never seen in crows. I pounded the glass, trying to get them to just shut up so that I could think clearly. I looked back at the man and my eyes widened. Blood had poured from his leg onto the floor. He had lost much more than a man could lose and still live. At this point, I was still sane enough to know that I should check his heart rate. I did, on his neck, and he was most certainly dead. What was his name? Fred something. What something? The cawing still grew louder. There was no way it could be coming from outside, it had to be coming from inside my own room.

The man! Yes, the man was making the noise. I grabbed a scalpel and began to saw at his neck with it, in my insanity, but the cawing remained steady. When the man's head was completely separated (it should have taken more strength to do that. Why had it been so easy?) I looked back at the window to witness a crow break off from the main group and fly directly toward my room. It hit the window with a very loud smack, and its insides were splattered against the glass. And still the cawing grew.

I struck at the man. How could the cawing grow louder, when more birds were dying? For surely there were also three, or more, or less, crows at each window. That is a lot of windows. Unless they were only attacking my window. My scalpel sunk deep into his skin. I was being driven mad by this silly cawing, these crows.

I fell on the ground, writhing in pain. My head was going to split open any second.

And then the cawing stopped, very suddenly. I looked around. I stood. I looked at the window. Out the window.

The crows were separating. It looked like they were flying away. All of them. But then they turned. Really they had just been getting momentum. And now there weren't thousands, but there were billions. Trillions of birds. They blotted out the sky. So many damned crows. And they were all headed straight for the hospital. I calmly stood at the window and watched them come. Quite a few hit my window before it broke. And then they were pummeling me. So many crows, hitting me. Their beaks tore into my skin.

I was able to feel my heart beat. I felt its beats get faster and faster. I couldn't see anymore; there were crows that had hit my eyes. But I could feel my heart. And I was able to feel my heart stop.


End file.
